god bless your soul and your aching bones
by but seriously
Summary: "Open your eyes, Elena," he says into her ear, his lips burning across her skin. "I want you to remember this moment." klaus/elena, hints of klaus/caroline, jeremy. post-3x18


**ffnet has been an asshole and won't put up my fic. going to try this sucker one last time... posting this up from my tablet because my laptop hates ffnet too right now.  
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I must be asking for a writer's death wish—I've never read Elena/Klaus much less write them, but thought I'd give it a go.

And this was supposed to be a drabble; a page at the most. Hoo boy.

OH YES. For this fic's sake, let's pretend Jeremy never left. Unbeta'd, written for Sandrine at ishi-chan/Drakulina's comment fic meme on livejournal. Alright, on with the story. Oh wait—GO READ FLESH AND BONE TELEPHONE alright thanks bye—

—please review and tell me what you think, I will love you forever.

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**god bless your soul and your aching bones**

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"Is it nice down there where you are?" Klaus asks when he finds her again hours later, all toothy smiles and empty eyes as and she blinks up at him like she doesn't understand. Her hands are still on Jeremy's cheeks, her head is still on Jeremy's chest, and her ears are still straining to hear a heartbeat that will never come.

He crouches down beside her so their eyes are level. Hers are wide and red with tears that have long gone dry, his dark and impassive.

She used to think him frightening with rage in his eyes, with bodies all around, with blood in his hands. She realizes she's wrong—it's when you can't read him that he's the most dangerous.

"Why don't you come with me, sweetheart?" He holds his hand out.

.

.

The world is falling and crashing and burning around them and the only person—the _last_ person—Elena has to hold on to is the reason she needs someone to hold in the first place.

"This is your doing," Klaus says, and the low rumble of his voice sounds, in her ears, like her death march.

The scary part about it is that Elena knows him like he knows herself—knows what he plans on making her do, knows how he's going to punish her further for denying him.

First he's going to force her to look into the unseeing eyes of everyone he's killed—_Everyone _you've_ killed_, Klaus says—watch her try to wash their blood off her hands, and no matter how hard she scrubs and scratches and tears at her palms the blood won't come off—_It never really comes off_, Klaus says—and then he'll sit back on the pedestal of bodies and bones he's built for himself and just watch as her breathing comes out in shuddering gasps, watch as her tears cut a clear line through the soot on her cheeks, watch as she curls in on herself, wishing for death to wrap its arms around her as well.

Klaus steps closer and forces her face to his, and it's then that she realizes that _no_, the world's not burning—it's his eyes. "This is your doing," he says again.

The worst part about it is that Elena knows it's true.

.

.

He starts with Alaric. Absolutely ripping into his throat with his teeth, and when Alaric awakens, choking and gasping, Klaus tears out his heart. Alaric's hand thuds to his side as Elena screams, his ring glinting uselessly in the setting sun.

Klaus throws Damon—like it's so easy, like he doesn't even have to strain a muscle—over the cliff, knowing Stefan will come jumping after him, and their body gets swept away with the waterfall down into the jagged rocks below. Elena tries to close her eyes, tries to wish away the swirls of red that cloud up the water hundreds of feet below her, but Klaus grabs her chin and holds it in place, makes her stay until the water's washed the last of the blood away.

"This would have been so easy if you had just come with me," Klaus says low into her ear, and drags her away from the bloodbath.

Killing Caroline, Elena realizes with a shudder, had been a complete miscalculation on Klaus' part. He takes a staggering step back, and for a split moment Elena can see actual horror dawning in his eyes as he stares down at Caroline's heart in his hands, her blood splattered on his shirt—but then he takes a look at his intended victim, Tyler the _weak_, Tyler the fool, the one who was stupid enough to let Caroline push him aside, to let Caroline take the blow for him, and all light fades from his eyes.

Tyler's crying, yelling out _No no no no no no no no_, his voice getting hoarser and bloodier and less like a human and more like—more like a _wolf _as he holds Caroline in his arms, tries to brush away the doe-eyed shock from her eyes by closing them gently with his bloodied hands.

Klaus makes up for Caroline by killing Mayor Lockwood in front of him, ripping her chest open and throwing her body down like a marionette at his feet. Licking her blood, languorous and slow, off his fingers. And when he kills him, he makes sure he draws it out as long as possible, and when Elena weeps over Tyler's body later she loses count of how many stab wounds there are in his heart when she reaches seventy-two.

Klaus kills Jeremy last—or rather, Elena does.

Elena has her arms thrown around Jeremy, her last-ditch attempt to protect him, and even as he fights her off, even when Jeremy screams into her face to let him go, even when he says he's willing to die for her, Elena won't let go.

_You're my brother_, she cries into his shoulder, clutching at his sweater like he's the only reason he's still standing. "You're all I have left."

"How sweet," Klaus says, and Jeremy's arms tighten around Elena's waist. "But you'll soon learn family means nothing but an extra weight to lug around—literally."

"The allotted time for goodbyes is up," Klaus says.

"Where would you like this dagger, Jeremy? Your neck or your stomach? I rather like the idea of a gut shot," Klaus says.

"Or maybe Elena should do it," Klaus says.

"Trust me, you'd want to do it," he says, lounging back against an upturned truck, his legs crossed at his ankles and a dagger angling from his hands, brushing casually against his stomach. "You wouldn't want him to suffer the same fate as your little witch friend, do you?"

Elena chokes on her sob, sees Bonnie's face with the blood trickling from her mouth and the sunken hollow of her head where Klaus had swung a bat, _Jeremy's baseball bat,_ straight and true to the back of her skull in retaliation to her frying his brains out.

Klaus hands her the dagger wordlessly, anticipation lighting up his eyes. The wind whips her hair about her cheeks and she feels like she's stuck in the vortex of a hurricane, the way her breath seems to be torn out of her throat and the way she can't see anything through her tears.

Brushing back a lock of her hair, Jeremy nods. "You can do this."

Her shoulders are shaking. "I can't—Klaus, you can't make m—I can't _kill _Jeremy—"

Klaus' eyes are cold and his lips are calculating in his mirth. "Of course you _can_. It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?"

Elena looks up at him, so tall, with his broad shoulders and eyes that crinkle when he grins. With his floppy hair and his tanned skin, with his big smile and even bigger heart. The one she's about to drive a dagger into.

He looks at her, eyes clear and bright, and she knows—_just knows_—that Jeremy has his mind set and there's no swaying him. Jeremy blows his last breath onto Elena's cheeks, warm and soothing. "I love you, 'Lena."

She whispers into the crook of his neck, "I love you, Jer."

And then she twists the dagger into his heart.

Jeremy gasps and falls into her and she can barely hold his weight as he coughs up blood, hot and sticky onto her neck. His eyes are wide and his pupils are dilating, and she thinks he's saying something but can't hear through his breathy rasps. Another sob shudders down her spine and she wants to just run, drop the dagger and run, curl up in the foetal position on her bed, slam her hands to her ears, screw her eyes shut and just sleep, sleep forever like that princess, surround herself with vines and poisonous things, ugly things, things even Klaus revered, things beyond Klaus' control—

Her sneakers scrape the gravel in her mad dash to get away, but Klaus is suddenly behind her, his hands places at her waist, holding her in place.

"Shh," he whispers into her hair, and she's absolutely disgusted, wants to tear his lips off his face for even being so near, wants to slam his face to the ground for being so _soothing. _She lets out a silent scream as he starts rubbing slow, tantalizing circles on her hips with his thumbs. "Open your eyes, Elena," he says into her ear, his lips burning across her skin. "I want you to remember this moment."

Jeremy reaches a shaking hand out, tries to grasp hers; tries to hold them to his chest, but her arms are trapped in Klaus'. Jeremy dies with his eyes wide open.

.

.

The sun hangs high above the roof tops, burning magnificently against the backdrop of blue sky, and Elena swears she can hear birds singing as she eats peanut butter straight from the jar. She's wearing her favourite sundress, the one she'd bought with her parents on their cruise trip to California, and she's even humming that Ke$ha song under her breath.

The doorbell rings.

"Jeremy?" she calls, her head in the cabinet looking for the box of macaroons. "Could you get that?"

When no one answers, she heaves a sigh and steps out of the kitchen and down the hall. With the spoonful of peanut butter still trapped in her lips, she swings the front door open—

—and the spoon nearly drops from her mouth as the door opens to reveal Klaus leaning casually against her door frame.

"Afternoon, Elena," he greets cordially, even offers her a charming little grin. "I'm thinking of leaving, maybe going somewhere with an actual bar. Why don't you come with me?"

He holds his hand out.

.

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**fin**

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End file.
